[Sidenote: New principles of alliance.]
In this state of things, a new principle of alliances and wars is
opened. The Treaty of Westphalia is, with France, an antiquated fable.
The rights and liberties she was bound to maintain are now a system of
wrong and tyranny which she is bound to destroy. Her good and ill
dispositions are shown by the same means. _To communicate peaceably_ the
rights of men is the true mode of her showing her _friendship_; to force
sovereigns to _submit_ to those rights is her mode of _hostility_. So
that, either as friend or foe, her whole scheme has been, and is, to
throw the Empire into confusion; and those statesmen who follow the old
routine of politics may see in this general confusion, and in the danger
of the _lesser_ princes, an occasion, as protectors or enemies, of
connecting their territories to one or the other of the _two great_
German powers. They do not take into consideration that the means which
they encourage, as leading to the event they desire, will with certainty
not only ravage and destroy the Empire, but, if they should for a moment
seem to aggrandize the two great houses, will also establish principles
and confirm tempers amongst the people which will preclude the two
sovereigns from the possibility of holding what they acquire, or even
the dominions which they have inherited.
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